Dark Victory

The Verdict

Patricia Bowman and the Florida state prosecutors may have been blown away by the Kennedys’ pageant of piety in Palm Beach. But as the author discovers in conversations with her mother and stepfather—patriarch of the other Irish Catholic family in the drama—and in an exclusive print interview with Bowman at her home in Jupiter, Florida, William Smith’s victory has not left her in defeat.

“One of the most asked questions about you is, What was she doing in a bar at three o’clock in the morning?”

“Yes, I was out late with friends, but so was he. The issue of what I was doing at three in the morning has nothing to do with what happened to me from that man.”

Dr. William Kennedy Smith’s rape trial so enthralled the country that the news of his acquittal was even flashed on the message screen at Hollywood Park racetrack, for those engaged in pursuits [#image: /photos/54cc03a21ca1cf0a23ad6615]other than watching Court TV or CNN that Wednesday afternoon in early December. Along with the Persian Gulf War, the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, the Soviet coup, and the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, Smith’s trial was one of last year’s most watched television events. Intimates of Smith’s family said that the Kennedys were never in doubt about the outcome of the trial. From the first day, there was private talk in their midst of the victory party that would follow the acquittal. And so it came to pass.

From the beginning, the accuser was of considerably less interest than the accused. Had the tabloid newspaper The Globe and The New York Times not published her name, Patricia Bowman, as she is called, would have been totally unknown, no more than a bit player in this movie-of-the-week date-rape story, until her appearance on the witness stand in West Palm Beach, Florida, where, from behind the dot that shielded her face, she pointed her finger at the accused and said to his lawyer, “Your client raped me.” It was Smith who commanded the attention, William Kennedy Smith, Willie Smith, or Will Smith, as his lawyer renamed him for the trial, the grandson of the late ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and his wife, Rose, the nephew of Senator Edward Moore Kennedy, the nephew of the slain president of the United States John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the nephew of the slain former attorney general of the United States Robert Francis Kennedy, the cousin of the Assistant District Attorney John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., the cousin of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, the cousin of Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, the cousin of Rhode Island state representative Patrick Joseph Kennedy, the cousin of Maria Shriver, and the cousin of some twenty-five others of varying degrees of celebrity and recognizability. By comparison, Patricia Bowman, despite being the stepdaughter of the former chairman of the board of General Tire & Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio, was a virtual nonentity.

The verdict, not guilty, was a disappointment to some, a cause for delirium to others, but a surprise to no one. From the moment on the first day of the trial when Judge Mary Lupo disallowed, without comment, the testimony of three other women—a doctor, a medical student, and a law student who at the time was the girlfriend of Smith’s cousin Matthew Maxwell Kennedy—who claimed they were sexually assaulted by Smith between 1983 and 1988, the die was cast. Only the speed with which the jury of six people selected to decide Smith’s fate arrived at their decision was a surprise: a mere seventy-seven minutes, including the time it took to pick a foreman. They had asked for no testimony to be read back, no evidence to ponder; they had no questions for Judge Lupo. Nor did they feel any constraints of propriety to sit around for three hours, or perhaps even overnight, to make their decision seem more carefully arrived at. Only reasonable doubt had to be shown, and it had been.

Like the retired armchair generals of the Gulf War, lawyers across the land went on television each night to rate the performances of the defense and prosecution in Courtroom 411. Many were irate at the proceedings, saying that if a Kennedy were not involved and the alleged rape had not taken place in such a gilded arena as Palm Beach the case would not have attracted the international attention that it did, as if that were a brilliant or original argument. Of course the case would not have attracted such attention if a Kennedy had not been involved. But a Kennedy was involved, and the Kennedys are America’s most famous theatrical family and have been for a half a century. They have outdone the Greeks for tragedy. They have outdone Hollywood for scandal. Love them, hate them, they are bigger than life, and they know instinctively how to play each scene in their continuing, mesmerizing saga. Once the Kennedy family’s arrival and departure habits at the Palm Beach County Courthouse in West Palm Beach became known during the trial, the crowds got larger each day to stare at the family members and cheer them. Even Judge Lupo was not immune to the Kennedy charisma. She was photographed greeting Sargent Shriver in her courtroom after having been introduced to him by Smith’s attorney Roy Black.

The fascinating picture of a famous family fighting for its life, and winning, with almost every member of it behind the young doctor who had brought them to the brink of disaster, was a spectacle more riveting than much of the trial itself. They gave an unprecedented display of solidarity combined with stardom, waving at the press, smiling at the photographers, any one of them capable at any moment of stepping in front of the bank of microphones and addressing the multitudes. “We are a very close family,” all of them said over and over again. And they are. Or appeared to be, judging by the parade of loyal relations who came in and went out of the courtroom. When I remarked on this closeness to a Palm Beach person who has had warm connections with the family for more than thirty years, the reply was “They’ll stick by Willie through thick and thin, but when this is over, and they’re alone, they’ll beat the shit out of him.”

In the smart circles of the community, there were snorts of derision every time the Kennedys were referred to as America’s royal family. And yet, for many people, they are America’s royal family, despite Chappaquiddick, despite their flaws, despite their abuses of power, despite their marital infidelities. The Kennedy women, the aunts of the man on trial, with their family sorrows wrinkled into faces that have taken too much Palm Beach and Hyannis sun over the years, came in relays to the courtroom, heads held high. They had been through worse events than this. Several times. Like dowager archduchesses of a royal house, believing in the divine rights of kings, or Kennedys, they sat unblinking as the prosecution co-counsel, Ellen Roberts, gave graphic descriptions of chilling acts of brutality, meant to show a pattern in their nephew’s behavior, in her plea to Judge Lupo to allow the inclusion of the testimony of the three women besides the accuser who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Smith. One morning Eunice Kennedy Shriver, seventy, holding the sweaters and shawls she brought to the courthouse because of the excessive air-conditioning, walked up to the microphones, unasked, with Willie, her nephew, on one side of her, Jean, her sister, on the other, and Ethel, her sister-in-law, behind her. She began speaking in a voice eerily reminiscent of that of the late President Kennedy, saying that the family was there to support her sister Jean. She told of how wonderfully Jean had brought up her four children, and detailed the educational and career history of each, including Willie, whom she called William, the doctor. She referred to the event as “this sad trial,” as if it were no more than a nuisance in their lives. She said that thirty of William’s relatives would be coming to the community to give family support, and then, imperially, she ended her speech with a greeting to the assembled throng: “I wish you a happy Christmas and a gift of loyal family relationships.”

Actually, only nineteen family members came into the courtroom. Among those were Smith’s brother, Stephen junior, and his two adopted sisters, Amanda and Kym, a Vietnamese; Ethel Kennedy, Robert’s widow, and two of her sons, Robert junior and Michael; Sargent Shriver, the husband of Eunice, and one of his sons; Patricia Lawford and three of the four Lawford children; John Kennedy Jr., the star of the new generation, who, although he was reported as saying his appearance at the trial was a reluctant one, brought about by family pressure, later denied this. There was much speculation about whether the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would arrive to do her stint. At a Palm Beach dinner party that I attended during the trial, two society ladies were discussing the case that so obsessed the community. One was a childhood friend of Mrs. Onassis’s. “They’ll never get Jackie here at this trial,” she said knowingly. The “they” she was referring to was the Kennedy family. Mrs. Onassis never appeared. Nor did her daughter, Caroline.

Most of the family members were billeted in various private houses in Palm Beach. Only the Smiths and Senator Kennedy, when he arrived for his forty-five-minute appearance on the stand, stayed at the compound. The rest of the mansion was occupied by Smith’s lawyers and his public-relations spokeswoman, Barbara Gamarekian, who had formerly been with The New York Times; it was used as a sort of command center throughout. One Palm Beach hostess, with whom several members of the family were staying, was told, “Don’t worry about us for dinner. We have a strategy session every night at dinner at the compound.”

They were a family on their best behavior. They did nothing to appear too rich. There were no limousines, no chauffeurs. Evoking the common touch, the immediate family arrived each day in a battered 1989 Mercury station wagon, usually driven by Bridey Sullivan, the Smiths’ longtime housekeeper. Other members used nondescript rented cars, with everyone piling in and making room at the end of the day, just like folks. No one wore smart Palm Beachy clothes. However they spent their evenings, they spent them in private. They were not sighted at a single Palm Beach party. Or restaurant. And certainly no bar or night spot. A person who watched the trial on television with one of Smith’s aunts on a day when she wasn’t in court told me the aunt said, “I must tell the Professor [Roy Black] to stop saying ‘the Kennedy estate.’ It doesn’t sound right. He should say ‘the Kennedy house.’ ”

Other than at the courthouse, the family’s only public appearances were at St. Edward’s Roman Catholic Church, where a phalanx of photographers waited outside each Mass to catch them arriving or leaving. Smith himself was photographed kneeling at prayer. The Catholic Church assumed an uneasy role in the proceedings, with the juxtaposition of early Mass and Communion followed on some days by graphic sexual testimony in the courtroom, in which words such as “penis,” “vagina,” “erection,” “semi-erection,” “ejaculation,” and “semen” were listened to with equanimity by the communicants, as if there were no inconsistency. The single refinement, in the name of good taste, came from Smith himself. He said his accuser had “massaged” him to ejaculation, sparing the courtroom and his family the words “jerked off.” When a Roman-collared Jesuit seminarian who had earlier attended Mass with Smith and his mother accompanied the family to court for the closing arguments, he was strategically seated behind Smith and in full view of the jury. A reporter next to me whispered in my ear, “My God, I bet they wheel in Rose next,” referring to the 101-year-old Rose Kennedy, Smith’s grandmother, who is in retirement in Hyannis.

Only occasionally were old-time signs of superiority manifested. When the tape recorder of David Margolick, the reporter from The New York Times, went off accidentally in his pocket and began playing, creating a momentary confusion, Eunice Shriver turned around and pointed Margolick out to the bailiff, causing the reporter to be evicted from the courtroom. On the day that Willie Smith was to testify, Robert Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer who was there with his brother Michael, was dissatisfied with his seat. The courtroom was very small. There were sixteen seats for the public and sixteen seats for the media. The Kennedy family had three seats allotted to them, as did the family and friends of Patricia Bowman. Kennedy wanted to sit on the aisle, but a man and a woman were already sitting in the two aisle seats. He went over and asked them to change places. They refused. Rebuffed, he returned to his seat and glared at them. He then rose, passed the couple, and went to the bailiff in the rear of the courtroom to ask him to ask the people to move so that he could sit there. The bailiff said the seating was first come, first serve. Still not ready to give up, Kennedy went back to the couple and said, “We’d really like to sit here while Will is on the stand.” The woman replied, “We would have liked to sit in these seats when Patty was testifying.” “You don’t understand, we’re family,” said Kennedy, as if that would make them scramble. “No, you don’t understand, I’m family,” replied the man, who turned out to be Shawn O’Neil, one of Patricia Bowman’s stepbrothers, who was sitting with Anne Seymour of the National Victim Center.

It is a fact of the judicial system that rarely are the prosecutors from the district attorney’s offices around the country a match for the defense attorneys rich defendants such as William Kennedy Smith can hire. And so it was in Palm Beach. Assistant State Attorney of Palm Beach County Moira Lasch, the prosecutor, forty, was considered the star in her office, with a nearly 100 percent track record for convictions. In 1987 she was named prosecutor of the year. Smith’s lawyer, the highly regarded Roy Black, forty-six, known in Miami legal circles as “the Professor,” was perhaps hitherto best known for winning the acquittal of the Hispanic police officer who had sparked the 1989 Miami race riots by shooting a black motorcyclist. He has successfully defended murderers and drug traffickers. In another Miami case, he defended a young mother charged with drowning her three-year-old son, and succeeded in keeping from the jury the fact that the child’s sibling had also drowned in a sink. Two other defense attorneys had preceded Black on this case: Herbert “Jack” Miller of Washington, D.C., who had been Senator Edward Kennedy’s lawyer in the Chappaquiddick affair in 1969 and who was replaced after the prosecution likened his strategy to those he had used at that time, and Mark Schnapp of Miami, who received a call from Willie Smith two days after the incident and remained on the case as part of the four-lawyer defense team after Black took over. Although Black reportedly received only a quarter of a million dollars for his services, a relatively low fee considering the family involved, he took the case because of the international attention focused on it. However, the total amount spent on Smith’s defense seemed, by comparison with the money the prosecution spent, prodigious. Five private investigators worked for months digging up information on the background of Patricia Bowman, as well as of Anne Mercer and her boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, the two people Bowman telephoned to come to the Kennedy compound on the night of the incident. In addition, a dozen or so expert witnesses were called to cast doubt on Bowman’s story.

I was not dismayed by Moira Lasch’s lackluster, almost indifferent style during the jury selection. While Roy Black charmed and seduced the potential jurors with his folksy friendliness, she seemed distant and icy. From my early days in show business, however, I remembered actors who mumbled and disappointed during rehearsals and then gave electrifying performances on opening night, or, in this case, the first day of the trial. But she wasn’t. Nothing changed. What we saw in the beginning was what we got throughout.

Lasch, who graduated magna cum laude from Vassar, studied art history at Boston University, and attended law school at the University of Maryland, is married to a dentist, Dr. Alan Lasch. West Palm Beach court reporters, familiar with her ways, observed that she was so obsessive about her teeth that she brushed them in a public rest room during court recesses. Everyone spoke of her lack of courtesy. She did not reply to reporters who said good morning to her in the corridors of the courthouse. Nor did she reply to morning salutations from Roy Black and his team. Lasch seemed not to mind being disliked; it was as if she mistook her unpopularity for strength, even though it undermined her over and over again. By the end of the trial, she had no one rooting for her.

Oblivious to her daily bad reviews in the newspapers and on television, she persevered in her somber style, never playing to the jury, never deviating from her questions written in longhand on a lined yellow tablet, sometimes seeming not to listen to the answers to her own questions. The only indication of any inner conflict with her frosty demeanor was her nervous left foot. It was in perpetual agitated motion, waving frantically in the air under the table when she sat, or stepping in and out of her open-toed sling-back shoe in a frenzied movement when she stood. She spoke in the passionless voice of a parochial-school nun, without resonance or energy, and her single vocal variant was shrillness. Her nostrils white with indignation, she asked Smith tauntingly, “What are you, some kind of sex machine?” when he stated he had ejaculated twice in short order, once on himself and again, a short swim and minutes later, in Bowman’s vagina.

One of Lasch’s most foolhardy decisions was to try to have Judge Lupo replaced before the trial started on the grounds that she was prejudiced in favor of the defense, as reflected in her “scowling, glaring, and frowning” at Lasch. The motion was denied, and this attempt to have the judge recuse herself proved to be a catastrophic error. The disharmony between Lupo and Lasch overflowed into a mutual dislike that was apparent to all. Lasch might have succeeded in having Lupo replaced if, instead of complaining about the judge’s face and prejudice, she had brought up the fact that Lupo’s husband and the husband of Lasch’s co-counsel, Ellen Roberts, were former law partners engaged in litigation with each other, over money. Had Smith kept his first lawyer, Herbert “Jack” Miller, Judge Lupo might have had to excuse herself from the case, as Miller had been a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, which she attended. When Lasch asked Lupo whether she ever knew Miller, Lupo, according to court papers filed by the prosecution, “refused to answer the question and just glared at me hostilely.” On one occasion during Smith’s turn on the stand, Lasch persisted in a line of questioning regarding the credibility of other witnesses’ testimony, which brought forth repeated objections from the defense and which prompted the judge to give her a blistering dressing-down in front of the crowded courtroom, as well as the television audience.

It was during the testimony of two key witnesses, Anne Mercer and Senator Kennedy, that the difference between Lasch and Black became most apparent. Mercer was an important witness for the prosecution, because, as a friend of the accuser, who had dined with her on the night of the incident and gone to the Kennedy estate to rescue her later, she was needed to establish Patricia Bowman’s credibility. It was Mercer’s boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, who had removed an urn from the Kennedy house to prove that Bowman had been there. In an ill-conceived decision, Anne Mercer appeared twice, for money, on the tabloid television show A Current Affair, and her second interview aired on the first night of the trial. Mercer was arrogant, hostile, haughty, a disastrous witness, and Black decimated her piece by piece. With an understanding of courtroom theatrics woefully lacking in his adversary, Black, in introducing the stolen urn, placed it in front of Mercer and left it there throughout her testimony, like contraband, for the jury to ponder. All professional kindliness gone, he moved in on Mercer like a hungry pit bull, in a belittling attack laced with sarcasm. And then, having defeated her, having deprived her of all credibility, having reduced her to a cheap money-grubber out to make a buck off her few moments of contact with America’s most famous family, he kept going, relentlessly, until he had achieved her total humiliation. To view the woman’s degradation was one of the most embarrassing moments of the trial. Frank Cerabino of The Palm Beach Post described Mercer as looking “like someone who had been thrown into the lion’s cage with a pork-chop tied around her neck.” Throughout Black’s attack on Mercer, Lasch and her co-counsel, Ellen Roberts, whispered together as if the carnage in front of them were not taking place. It could have been that Lasch was so angered by Mercer’s A Current Affair appearance that she hardly came to her witness’s rescue. Once she did rise to make an objection, but that was an objection to a tone of voice used by Black, an objection that Judge Lupo overruled.

Black, who during the jury-selection process had allowed, even led, potential jurors to indicate that Senator Kennedy was the least admired of all the Kennedys, bringing up his drinking, his womanizing, and, of course, Chappaquiddick, as a way of getting rid of the Kennedy haters, opened his arguments by paying homage to the senator, extolling his virtues, saying that he had been a father to twenty-one fatherless Kennedy children—two of the late president John Kennedy, eleven of the late attorney general Robert Kennedy, four of the late film actor Peter Lawford, whose first wife was Patricia Kennedy Lawford, and four of Stephen Smith, the late husband of Jean Kennedy Smith, the mother of William Kennedy Smith. “Senator Kennedy is very close to his sister Jean,” he said. “They are the two youngest in the family.”

The senator, who caused a near riot outside the courthouse on his arrival, walked past the cameras looking fit, trim even, after his bloated, red-faced demeanor following the Easter incident and his less than laudable performance during the Clarence Thomas hearings. In October he had acknowledged his personal shortcomings in a televised speech at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, in which he spoke of “the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them.” Everything about him in Palm Beach—hair, suit, tie—was in order. He was accompanied by his sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford. There was no sense of walking toward his nephew’s ignominy. He could have been going to another Kennedy wedding instead of being a witness at a rape trial. The imperial Kennedy had taken over. He entered the courtroom with the bailiff. He waved to Willie. He took the oath. He took the stand. His presence overpowered the court. The afternoon was his.

The senator, who has never felt shy about using his family’s grief to best advantage, brought his eyes just to the point of tears and his voice just to the point of cracking. He said he had been in Palm Beach that weekend because it was the first time since Steve Smith’s death that they had all been together, and he had wanted to spend more time with his sister Jean, who was Steve’s widow. He was up that night, he said, because he and his sister and some family friends, including William Barry, had been recalling and mourning Steve, who had died eight months before. He said that he had lost a brother in the war, and that Steve had become another brother to him. “Steve Smith is Will’s father. [He] was very special to me. He was next to a brother, really. We lost a brother in the war. When Jean married Steve, we had another brother. And when Steve was gone, something left all of us when we buried him.”

A tear dropped down the side of Willie’s face. His attorneys leaned toward him, and one offered him a handkerchief. The jury was spellbound.

“And I found that at the end of that conversation I was not able to think about sleeping,” he said. He needed to talk to his son and nephew. It was then that he got them out of bed to go out for a few beers.

“Are you close with your sister Jean?” asked Roy Black.

“Yes, very—well, very close family.”

“Since the death of her husband, have you tried to spend more time with her than you normally would have?”

“I have tried. We spend a lot of time together. I think my sister Pat, who is here, and Eunice have spent a lot of time with her too. I have tried to. The other members of the family … Ethel has. Jackie has. We are a very close family.”

With a little assistance from Roy Black, he was able to work in the assassination of his brother Robert.

“Could you tell us who Bill Barry is, what his relationship to the family is?”

“Well, Bill Barry was a former F.B.I. agent who now specializes in security matters. He was probably Jean and Steve’s—one of their two or three best friends. He was one of my brother Bob’s very best friends. And he provided security for my brother Bob in the 1968 campaign. And he was with my brother when he was killed.”

“Does he have a special relationship with the family?”

“Very, very special.”

“In fact, is he not the man who knocked the gun out of Sirhan Sirhan’s hand?”

“Yes.”

It was a masterly performance, reeking of bathos, having nothing whatever to do with the rape trial at hand, but he mesmerized the courtroom and, more important, the jury. The man who instigated the Good Friday incident by getting his son and nephew to go out drinking reversed the dynamic from a night of debauchery to one of sorrowing for dead relations. Surprisingly, Moira Lasch, who was usually prickly about the Kennedy propaganda machine, raised no objection that Black’s line of questioning was irrelevant. Liquor, that distorter of memory and perception, went virtually unmentioned. And no question was asked about the senator’s highly publicized appearance without his pants. The senator snowed the prosecutor.

At the end of that day, William Smith, by then a practiced giver of near-nightly statements to the media, stepped to the microphones and commented, “I was very moved by a lot of things my uncle said. I think this process has been unfair to him. I don’t say that in a bitter way. I just mean it in my heart.”

Patrick Kennedy, the senator’s twenty-four-year-old son, took the stand next. He is a state representative in the Rhode Island legislature. He had been Will Smith’s roommate at the Kennedy mansion on the Easter weekend, and it was to Patrick that Willie confessed he had “pulled out” before ejaculating into the woman he had brought home from Au Bar that night. Patrick, highly nervous, one side of his face covered in hives, took the stand concurrently with newspaper revelations of a hitherto unknown drugged past, time spent in a rehab to break a reported cocaine habit while he was still a student at Andover. The beans were spilled by a former roommate at the rehab, who claimed that an abusive Senator Kennedy had tried to bribe him to retract his story. Several times, Patrick’s version of events contradicted his father’s. Roy Black declined to cross-examine him.

The arrival of Patricia Bowman into the courtroom was one of the most dramatic moments of the trial. In the almost nine months since the Good Friday incident, she had never made a public statement or a public appearance, maintaining a Garboesque privacy about her family, her child, and herself. So unknown was she that it was several minutes before reporters in the media room realized that the five-foot-six-inch woman entering the courtroom was the famous Patricia Bowman. A shout went up, and reporters crowded in front of the closed-circuit monitors to stare at her in the brief time before the blue dot went up to shield her face. Her appearance, almost prim, contrasted with her reputation. “She isn’t at all what I expected,” several people said. We, but not the jury, had heard of her three abortions, her child born out of wedlock, her use of cocaine. She is pretty, but not beautiful. The months of waiting had taken their toll on her. Her hair that day was cut in a pageboy. She was dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, with a single strand of pearls and a gold pin.

If she was intimidated by seeing the trouncing her friend Anne Mercer had gone through several days earlier, it did not show. Even behind the blue dot, Bowman made a powerful impression on the stand as she described the events of the evening. She said that she had felt perfectly safe. “I was taking him to the Kennedy home, which I assumed would have security. There was a senator there. I didn’t feel I was in any danger whatsoever.” She wept often, perhaps too often. At one point, she sent chills through the courtroom as she described the attack. “I thought he was going to kill me,” she said. Roy Black never broke her story.

Patricia Bowman’s strong showing made it mandatory for William Smith himself to take the stand, in order to give his own version of the events of March 30. Prior to Smith’s appearance, Roy Black addressed the court. “We want to call Mr. Smith as a witness, but we want to make sure the state can’t open the door on cross-examination and enter evidence the court has ruled as irrelevant.” He was talking about the three other women, whose nonpresence had hovered over the trial from the beginning. Lasch objected: “The truth of the defendant’s statement cannot be offered in a vacuum. He can read a script, a prepared statement he’s gone over. He knows exactly what questions will be asked, how to answer, and he’s home free.” Lupo ruled with the defense again. With the full assurance that nothing about the other women in his life could be asked, Smith took the stand. Like Bowman, he was a very good witness.

“How are you feeling now?” asked Roy Black.

“I’m very, very nervous, but I remember what you said to me, tell the truth and I will be fine.” And he was. Better than fine. His version of the night differed markedly from hers. He became a passive participant. She picked him up at Au Bar. She unbuttoned his trousers. She massaged him. She helped him enter her. Once, he corrected his lawyer on the term “act of love.” Smith called it, simply, sex. Bowman had spoken of one act of violence. He spoke of two acts of sex. He said that when he called Bowman Cathie by mistake she became furious and told him to get off her.

Around midnight of the day that William Kennedy Smith took the stand, the telephone rang in my room at the Brazilian Court Hotel in Palm Beach. I had just gone to sleep. A woman who said she could not identify herself was on the other end. “I saw you in court. I knew who you were,” she said. For a moment I thought she was a Kennedy relation. She spoke to me for several minutes about Smith’s testimony of that day. It was not until she said “He’ll never let me alone—I saw that today” that I realized my midnight caller was Patricia Bowman.

“Will you let me talk to you?” I asked.

“I can’t decide anything until after this is over,” she replied. Our conversation was ended.

‘They say that gratitude is the memory of the heart,” Willie Smith began his final speech to the crowd outside the courthouse after his acquittal. The quote, which did not have the ring of being off the top of his head, was from Jean Baptiste Massieu, a nineteenth-century teacher of deaf-mutes. He continued, “And I have enough memories in my heart to last a lifetime. I want to say thank you most of all to my mother. I don’t think it’s possible for a child ever to repay the debt they owe their parents. I only hope I can be as good a parent to my children as my mother has been to me.” His beaming family looked on proudly, as if he had won an election rather than an acquittal. The victory party at the compound was simple, according to all reports: pretzels, beer, and pizza. Barbara Gamarekian, talking from the mansion that night, said of Willie, “He’s just walking around with a big grin on his face.”

Intoxicated with his triumph, Roy Black went on numerous television programs, even appearing on A Current Affair, the tabloid show he had trashed so mercilessly throughout the trial, and clearly enjoying his new national and international fame, which, prior to the trial, had been restricted to the South Florida arena. He infuriated counselors from rape crisis centers around the country by saying in USA Today about Smith, “The jury got a look at him. They saw he was articulate, well-spoken, the antithesis of a rapist”—as if all rapists looked like another Willie, Willie Horton. On a television show on which we both appeared the morning after the acquittal, Black told me that after the verdict he had gone to the Kennedy compound where they, together with Charles O’Byrne, the Jesuit seminarian, had sat around in a circle, held hands, and “said a prayer for Patty,” a story he repeated on several shows. It was difficult not to question the heartfeltness of such a prayer. If it actually took place, it would have been better left unmentioned, rather than bragged about, as it sounded pious and self-congratulatory. Having won, he continued to discredit Bowman on each program, casting doubts on her sanity by referring to her as trouble, disturbed, or mentally unstable.

Jupiter, Florida, is only forty minutes, but a thousand miles away, from Palm Beach. The houses, in a new development, are similar in style, a Florida-Mediterranean look, mostly beigy-pink in color, with tile roofs, priced in the $150,000-to-$175,000 range. There are hibiscus plants in the front yards, and palm trees. It is very much a community for young families; on a recent sunny weekend afternoon, neighbors were outside, mothers bringing in groceries, father playing catch with their sons, or polishing nice cars, or doing lawn work. “Don’t step on the grass, Stacy,” a mother called out to her daughter, about a just-seeded lawn. It is here that Patricia Bowman, the woman who brought a rape charge against William Kennedy Smith and lost, lives with her daughter, Caroline.

Bowman’s house is on a corner lot about fifteen or twenty feet away from the house next to it. There is a small backyard, fenced in, with a multicolored child’s slide the main object of interest. The house belongs to Bowman free and clear. It was a gift from her rich stepfather. Her stepfather, who has thirteen children of his own, also set up a trust fund for her which gives her an income of more than $20,000 a year. The single difference from the other houses in the neighborhood is the NO TRESPASSING sign in front. The sign was put up shortly after the now notorious Easter weekend, when members of the media began to camp out there, finally forcing her to abandon her home, hidden in the trunk of her mother’s car, and retreat to the house of her mother and stepfather several miles away, behind the guarded gates of the Loxahatchee Country Club. She also spent several months at her parents’ condominium in Akron, Ohio.

The previous morning I had visited Mr. and Mrs. O’Neil at their home and had lunch with Mrs. O’Neil at the country club, which overlooks a splendid Jack Nicklaus–designed golf course. Both O’Neils are avid golfers. Michael O’Neil, seventy, is called Jerry by everyone, although his stepdaughter, Patricia, calls him Boomer because of his loud, gravelly speaking voice. He is a tough-talking, no-nonsense kind of man. Sitting with him in the sun-room of the winter home he built in 1984, I asked him about the enormous number of children he had.

“Now wait just one damn minute,” he said, pointing his finger at me and shaking it. “You’re not here to interview me. You’re here for me to interview you to see if we’re going to let you talk to Patty.”

He then asked me what the circulation for this magazine is. Unnerved by his brusqueness, at that moment I couldn’t remember. “What the hell kind of writer is it who doesn’t know the circulation of the magazine he writes for?” he asked.

Somehow we got past all that. “Patty’s a terrific mother,” he said finally. He talked for a long time about Patty’s daughter, Caroline, and his gruff manner evaporated into grandfatherly delight.

“How do you feel about the outcome?” I asked, referring to the verdict.

“I’m goddamn mad, and I have a right to be,” he answered.

“What do you think about the defense’s applying to the state of Florida to assume some of Willie Smith’s legal fees?”

“I’ll be happy to pay $50,000 toward his defense fee if he takes a lie-detector test,” answered Jerry O’Neil.

Jean O’Neil, who is his second wife, explained to me about his fourteen children. He and his first wife had seven children. When his first wife’s sister died, he adopted her seven children, many of whom were the same age as his own children. Subsequently, one of them died. They lived in a huge red-brick Tudor house in Akron, Ohio. After O’Neil divorced his wife, he and Jean were married. Patty Bowman, who was Jean’s only child from her first marriage, was nineteen at the time. O’Neil’s first wife died shortly afterward. At the age of sixteen, each child in the family got a car. At one point, Jean O’Neil remembers, there were fifteen cars parked in the driveway. “We ate dinner at 6:30 every night,” she said. “We all sat at the dinner table. It was family time. There were lots of great discussions. Jerry spent a lot of time with those children.”

On the day I went to Patricia Bowman’s house in Jupiter, three days after the verdict, I gave a pre-arranged signal at her door: two short rings and a long one. Inside, she was trimming a Christmas tree. Unlike Willie Smith, she was not walking around with a big grin on her face. She was dressed in a turquoise Ralph Lauren polo shirt and white shorts. She wore no makeup, and her hair was pulled back in a rubber band. “Do you want a Coke? I’m going to have one,” she said, going into the kitchen. The books in her bookcase were not the sort of books I would have expected. Among them were novels by George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad, a volume of Proust, and a collection of poems of Robert Frost. While she talked, her attention never strayed far from Caroline, her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the film actress Goldie Hawn. The child, whose twin was lost in a miscarriage early in the pregnancy, was born ten weeks prematurely and weighed three pounds. Jean O’Neil had told me, “Patty loved that child to life.” Bowman put on a video in an adjoining room for the little girl to watch, but it was not the video Caroline wanted, so she changed it.

“What made you decide to go public, after being so private?” I asked.

“I’m only giving two interviews—to you and to Diane Sawyer. The defense attorney Mr. Black was saying I was nuts and using my name on TV,” she replied very matter-of-factly, as if no further reason was necessary. When she talks, she looks you right in the eye. “Besides, I felt the need to get out there and urge victims to prosecute, because it’s part of the healing process.” She told me that there had been 40 percent fewer reports of rape in that area since she made her charge. During Bowman’s time on the stand, a woman reporter sitting next to me had whispered in my ear, “If I were ever raped, I’d never report it.”

“What was it like when you heard the verdict?” I asked.

“I was having so many flashbacks. When he had me in that little room [in the Kennedy compound the night of the incident], and I told him that he raped me, and he looked at me, the calmest, smuggest, most arrogant man, and he said, ‘No one will believe you.’ And the jury came in and said, ‘Not guilty,’ and I was right back in that room with that man telling me no one would believe me.”

“Have you talked with the other three women who were prepared to testify?”

“No. I don’t even know their names. I’ve heard some of their first names.”

“Did any of the three try to get in touch with you?”

“No. There is the legality of witness rules and things like that. I couldn’t even talk to my rape counselors, who had helped me, because they were subpoenaed initially as witnesses.” Bowman contacted Anne Seymour of the National Victim Center in Washington, D.C., after seeing her on the Oprah Winfrey show, and Seymour subsequently acted as her advocate in the weeks before and during the trial.

“At the time of the incident, the police, the prosecutors, the rape counselors, and the doctors who examined you believed your story.”

“Yes.”

“And you passed two polygraph tests and a voice-test analysis.”

“Yes.” “Then where did it all go wrong?”

“It’s the acquittal that money can buy. They had nine months to come up with their story.… I had to give five statements. My deposition took three days—720-some pages—and there were three defense attorneys and two prosecutors and one of my attorneys. And this is over a period of eight months that I had to give these statements.… When did Willie ever give a statement? He had nine months. He had five of my statements and everybody else’s statements. He had the forensic evidence. He had all kinds of resources, which they’ve already testified that they used. He had all this material with which to concoct a story. And that’s what he did. He concocted a story. He fit every nook and cranny. Everything I couldn’t remember, because of rape-trauma syndrome, he could come up with something for. Everything that fit in with the forensic evidence, he found an answer for it.”

“Do you feel that Moira Lasch let you down?”

“Oh, no,” she replied quickly. Neither she nor her father would hear any criticism of the prosecutor. “I admire her,” she said over and over. “I was proud of her. Moira and I have formed quite a bond. I care a lot about her. She came to my parents’ house on the night of the verdict with her husband. They call her the Ice Queen, but she cried, and I got hugged by her. She tried her best.” Her affection and admiration for Lasch remained constant each time I talked to her. “I strongly believe that Judge Lupo couldn’t stand her,” she said.

“At what moment that night did he change, from being obviously a nice guy?”

“I had no fears about him. He asked if I wanted to go swimming. I can’t swim. I’ve got stretch marks. I’m not about to do anything like that.… The water’s freezing out there. I’m thinking, What does this guy want to go swimming for? And he started on his pants. And I thought, I just met this guy an hour or so ago. I don’t necessarily want to see him in his boxer shorts. So I turned my back. I didn’t see him totally undress. I just saw him working on his pants. I thought, Well, it’s late, he’s going swimming. I should go. I started going toward the stairs. And then my leg was grabbed.… I struggled to get away from him. That should be a sign to a rational person: Don’t do this. He had been a nice man. And all of a sudden, this man has grabbed my leg. He’s on top of me. He’s hurting my body.”

“You did not consent to sex?”

“I did not consent to any type of sexual activity with him. I kissed him. It was nothing big or romantic. I did not consider a kiss an invitation to rape me.”

“Willie said he called you Cathie after sex.”

“I never heard the word ‘Cathie’ until he said that in the courtroom. Look, if what he said was the truth, why didn’t he come forward and tell the police all that? He waited nine months to hear every word that came out of my mouth to concoct his story.”

Later, at Caroline’s request, she got a raspberry Popsicle out of the freezer for the child to eat while she watched the video. When Caroline dropped the Popsicle and stained the front of her white dress with the red ice, Bowman changed her dress, all the time continuing to talk with me.

“Johnny and I have had difficult times in our relationship, but this experience, believe it or not, has been the breakthrough for him and me, and it’s wonderful to see the two of them together. Initially he wanted to come and take care of us, but I couldn’t stand men being around me. I know that was hard on him. I never told the story to Johnny. I never told the story to anybody. I told it to the police and the rape counselor. I didn’t want to talk about it. Everybody had read things, but they’d never really heard it from me, and he was quite distraught after he’d heard my testimony and watched me testify on TV. My testimony was quite traumatic on all my family. I have brothers and sisters, and they all had to see it, too. I can’t imagine what Johnny goes through, just like I can’t imagine what my dad goes through thinking about what happened to me. I know my mom is very fond of Johnny, because of his strides to be a good parent to Caroline, and to be a good mate, even though I’m not sure that we’re at that stage. I think everybody’s extremely proud of Johnny, and the strides he’s made in accepting his parenthood.”

“And Caroline?”

“My daughter knows something happened to her mommy. When they had me at my mom’s house after the attack, and I was in real bad shape, and I couldn’t take care of Caroline, my mom was taking care of Caroline, and my mom was calling me Patty, and my daughter stopped calling me mom. She called me Patty. That was hard. My daughter never had sleeping problems, ever, in her entire life. All of a sudden she won’t go to bed. She’s up in the middle of the night, and I can’t figure it out. One of my neighbors said I was screaming in the middle of the night from the nightmares, and my daughter’s afraid.”

“When you got pregnant, how did Boomer, as you call him, and Jean handle that? You not being married. Was it a problem?”

“As any parent would when a child comes home and says, ‘I’m pregnant, I don’t want to get married, I want to have the child,’ they reacted normally. Out of a concern—a strong concern for my health. For my future. And for the child’s future. And said I had a lot of thinking to do. I think my dad at one time suggested I go to church. They just tried to support me. I know it had to have been hard for them.”

“Was it difficult when the ‘Dr. Dirt’s got the information on you about the abortions? What was that like with your parents?”

“My mother and I are very close. I have confided everything in my life to my mother. She’s well aware of … that was not shocking to her. Girls are different with their dads. And so, my dad has had an adjustment because of … of some of the true information, and I’m not going to tell what-all’s true, but I would tell you that 80 percent of what they—the Dr. Dirts and the media—reported about me is wrong. But my family supports me. It’s a different world now than it was for my parents, you know, and I try, I try my best, to be a good person, especially since I’ve become a parent. I’m adamant about trying my best, you know, to be a good Christian, and a good parent, and a good daughter. You know, that’s my focus in life, to be the best I can, and I know that my mom and Boomer really saw the change in me during my pregnancy, and have stood by me 100 percent. I’ve got great parents. I’ve got one of the greatest mothers in the world. And Boomer. I remember one day getting a call from some kid—I was up at the family home—and he said, ‘Is your dad there?’ And I said, ‘No. Can I take a message?’ The kid gave me his name, and I said, ‘What’s this about?’—you know, because we were screening media calls. And he said, ‘Oh, well, my tuition went up,’ and my first thought is, Why the hell are you calling my dad about tuition? And my dad’s putting some kid through college, you know—he’s a generous man. He helps people. He has a foundation that helps people.”

“What’s going to happen to you?”

“On the day the verdict came in, I was a goner. I was practically catatonic. The next day was surreal. The past few days have been … I’ve gotten away from my family, you know, from the hovering, and I needed some time to myself, and I came home, and Caroline’s toys were all over the floor. So I had to pick up the toys so I didn’t step on them, and the laundry needed to be done, and so after a couple of hours I found myself doing normal things, and I felt kind of relieved. Hey, this is over. Maybe I can go back to a normal life.… And that’s why I’m doing this interview. I’m standing up and saying, ‘No, I am not crazy. I am not a drug addict. I’ve never been treated for any drug problems. I’ve never been treated for any alcohol problem, because I’ve never had one. I’m not nuts. I’m not a prostitute. I’m not promiscuous. I have a small child. I have a life, a beautiful, full life that was tampered with, that a man tried to destroy on March 30, and that a group of men tried to destroy after that through the criminal process. But they haven’t destroyed me. I’m a survivor. And I will stand up each and every time and say, ‘What you did to me was wrong.’

“Every woman has the right to stand up for herself—especially if they’re victimized. And no matter what it takes, I will stand beside, behind, and with any victim who needs me. Any person who is persecuted. Because through the support I received, through the friendship, the understanding, the love, and God’s will, I have gotten through this. And I will help anybody else to do it, too.”

According to a spokesperson for the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, where Dr. Smith was to do his residency, he has not contacted them since his acquittal. They are waiting to discuss whether it would be in the best interests of Dr. Smith and the school to continue the relationship. Wherever he goes, William Smith is too famous now to retreat into medical oblivion. His victory was not unqualified. When his eloquent speech was over, he emerged from his ordeal with a blemished reputation. The dark cloud of the three other women hovered overhead. The admissibility of their statements was ruled against. They were unheard by the jury and most of the public. But they exist. They are. Their depositions are for sale, for anyone to read, at Sir Speedy, a photocopying service in West Palm Beach, for under fifty dollars, and every reporter on the case has read them. Spy magazine has announced it is investigating the accounts by twenty women of their encounters with Smith. Other writers are obsessed with the three years in Smith’s life between Duke University and Georgetown University School of Medicine.

The last time I spoke with Patricia Bowman by telephone, she had just come in from her postbox, where there was so much mail that her mother had to help her carry it. Even before her appearance on PrimeTime Live with Diane Sawyer, she had received thousands of letters, 90 percent of them favorable. There were also growing stacks of mail in the State Attorney’s Office. “How do they know where to write you?” I asked. “They just put ‘Jupiter, Florida,’ ” she said. Patricia Bowman, in defeat, seemed undefeated.

Dominick Dunne is a best-selling author and special correspondent for Vanity Fair. His diary is a mainstay of the magazine.